On 19 November 2024, Jaguar released a film to announce its new identity. It showed off a new typeface, a new colour palette and a new emblem, all described by the company as “exuberant modernism”. It did not show a car.

The film was widely mocked online, Elon Musk among the critics, and one of Britain’s most storied car brands became, for a week, a punchline.

Rebranding is the deliberate change of how an organisation presents itself, from its name, logo and visual identity to its positioning and promise, in order to change what customers, employees and investors believe it is and stands for.

Jaguar was hardly the first company to change its clothes in public and discover that the audience has opinions. What follows is the evidence: the cases that collapsed, the ones that worked so quietly nobody noticed, and the warning signs that separate them.

Why do rebrands fail?

Start with one of the fastest failures on record. On 4 October 2010, Gap replaced its familiar blue-box logo with the word “Gap” set in Helvetica and a small blue square perched on the corner of the “p”.

Customers revolted on Facebook and Twitter. Gap defended the design as modern, then invited the public to suggest improvements, which looked like a company unsure why it had acted at all. On 11 October the old logo was back. Gap North America’s president conceded that the company had handled it badly.

Verdict: a solution in search of a problem.

Tropicana took longer to fail and paid more. In February 2009 its American cartons were redesigned by the Arnell Group. The orange pierced by a straw gave way to a plain glass of juice, the name was turned on its side, and the cap was moulded to look like an orange.

Shoppers, it seemed, could no longer find their juice. After two months of complaints and a 20 per cent fall in sales, the old design returned.

Cracker Barrel repeated the experiment in August 2025. The restaurant chain removed the “old timer” from its logo, a figure based on the founder’s uncle who had sat with his arm on a barrel since the 1970s, in favour of plainer lettering. Within days the backlash had spread from regulars to politicians, including Donald Trump, and the share price slumped. Before the month was out, the company announced that the new logo was going and the old timer would stay.

The three cases share a pattern. Each company threw away the signals customers actually used to find it, and replaced them with something cleaner that said nothing new.

Marketers live with their own brand every day and grow bored of it long before customers do. Customers, glancing at a shelf for two seconds, are not bored at all. They are looking for something they know.

The Jaguar file

Jaguar’s case is more serious, because Jaguar was not tidying up. It was attempting a total reset.

The timeline runs like this. Two weeks after the teaser film, on 4 December, the company unveiled the Type 00, a concept car shown at Miami Art Week to preview its electric future, and opinion split again.

Jaguar’s own film of the Type 00 reveal at Miami Art Week.

Meanwhile Jaguar was winding down its petrol line-up ahead of relaunching as an electric-only marque. With almost nothing new to sell, its European registrations in April 2025 fell to 49 cars, against 1,961 a year earlier. That collapse reflected an empty product pipeline, not a logo. But it left the rebrand with no cars to speak for it.

In March 2026, JLR confirmed that Gerry McGovern, the designer who had led the redesign, would step down at the end of the month to start his own consultancy.

One distinction matters here. Revitalising a brand updates it while respecting what people already value. Rebranding it resets what it stands for.

Jaguar chose the reset. It set aside familiar codes, and the old “Grace, Space, Pace” spirit, that might have carried loyal buyers into the electric era.

Online, the questions were blunter. Was this satire? Was Jaguar still a luxury brand? Why launch a car company’s new identity without a car?

A rebrand should answer those questions before anyone thinks to ask them.

Verdict: still open. The cars will decide it. But the launch broke the first rule of changing clothes in public, which is to show people the body underneath.

The rebrands nobody noticed

Now the counter-evidence. Some of the most successful rebrands in recent memory barely made the news.

In September 2018, Dunkin’ Donuts announced it would become plain Dunkin’, with the new name rolling out from January 2019. The reasoning was hard to argue with.

Customers already called it Dunkin’. Fewer people were eating doughnuts, and the chain wanted to be known as a beverage-led brand. Only the redundant word left. (The legal entity, delightfully, is still Dunkin’ Donuts LLC.)

Burger King unveiled a new logo on 6 January 2021, its first major change in about 20 years. It was a variation on the bun-halves logo the chain had used from 1969 to 1994. The agency Jones Knowles Ritchie argued that Burger King had changed its food standards and restaurants, and the glossy, early-2000s identity no longer told the truth about the business. The new look borrowed from the past, so it felt familiar on day one.

Panasonic offers the long-game version. On 1 October 2008, Matsushita Electric Industrial renamed itself Panasonic Corporation, aligning the company name with the brand the world already knew.

The National brand, long familiar to Japanese households, had been replaced overseas by 2004 and was phased out at home by March 2010. The Matsushita name vanished from the company. Almost nobody outside Japan noticed, because nothing they bought had changed.

Verdict: these rebrands ratified something that was already true. That is the quiet secret. The best rebrands describe a change that has happened. The worst announce a change that has not.

Is changing your company name ever worth it?

Sometimes. But a new name is the most expensive outfit in the wardrobe, and it rarely hides what is underneath.

When Facebook announced on 28 October 2021 that its parent company would become Meta Platforms, it framed the change as a bet on the metaverse. It also arrived after a period of intense scrutiny and damaging whistleblower leaks, and critics treated it as a change of subject. The structure was sensible: the Facebook app kept its name, while the holding company took one broad enough for everything else. Whether the name changed anyone’s opinion of the company is another matter.

Meta’s announcement film: a new name for the parent, not the app.

Britain supplies the cautionary tale. In 2001, the Royal Mail’s parent company became Consignia, an invented name meant to suggest it did more than deliver letters. The public disliked it. So did staff, and their union refused to use it.

On 4 November 2002 the company began trading as Royal Mail Group plc. Less than two years in costume.

The Gulf shows how to do it more carefully. On 24 February 2022, Etisalat Group relaunched itself as e&, signalling a shift from telecoms operator to technology and investment group.

e& changed the parent’s name and kept Etisalat on the shopfront.

Just as important, it kept the familiar Etisalat name on its telecoms business in the UAE and abroad. The parent changed clothes. The shopfront customers knew did not.

Singapore has a recent and instructive case. In January 2022, NTUC Income announced it would convert from a co-operative into a company named Income Insurance, citing stiff competition, and the change was completed that September.

In July 2024, NTUC Enterprise agreed to sell a 51 per cent stake to Allianz. Reaction was largely negative, a minister found himself assuring Parliament that Income’s social mission would continue, and on 14 October 2024 the government blocked the deal. The name had changed. What many Singaporeans believed the company was for had not.

What actually decides the outcome?

Most corporate rebrands are triggered by structural events, above all mergers and acquisitions, rather than by a sudden urge to look modern. And changing the logo and colours does far less for a company’s reputation than changing what customers experience, particularly how employees behave. A new identity on an unchanged business is a costume. Customers can tell.

There are practical traps too. One online retailer of signal boosters changed its domain from RepeaterStore.com to Waveform.com, set up redirects for every page and followed the search engine’s own advice. Its Google traffic fell by about two-thirds the next day and was still down by the same amount almost six months later. Ask IT administrators how they feel about Azure Active Directory becoming Microsoft Entra ID and you will hear the other cost: renaming things people use every day makes them feel the company is rearranging furniture in their home without asking.

Picture a Singapore engineering firm that has quietly moved from installation into design and maintenance contracts. Its old name and logo suggest a contractor.

A rebrand here would describe something real, and the risk lies in execution: search rankings, tender documents, vehicle livery, staff who need to explain the change in one sentence. Contrast that with a firm whose new marketing director simply finds the old logo dated. Same budget. Very different odds.

Warning signs before you rebrand

From the case files, the red flags are consistent.

• Nobody can say, in one sentence, what has changed for the customer.
• The main argument is that the current identity feels “tired” to people inside the building.
• Recognisable assets such as a colour, a shape or a character are being thrown out rather than evolved.
• The reveal is a big-bang surprise, with no testing among the customers who rely on the old cues.
• Staff will learn about the change from the press release.
• Nobody has costed the dull parts: signage, packaging, domains, search, legal registrations.

Two or more of these, and the rebrand is probably about the people commissioning it, not the people buying from it.

The quiet winners in this file did the opposite. They kept whatever customers already recognised: a nickname, a familiar shape, the name on the products. They rolled out in stages or borrowed from their own past instead of staging a grand reveal. And they could explain the change in a sentence a cashier could repeat.

Questions from the press gallery

What is the difference between a rebrand and a refresh?
A refresh updates how a brand looks while keeping what it stands for and its most recognisable assets. A rebrand changes the name, the positioning or the core identity, and carries far more risk.

How long does a rebrand take?
A full corporate rebrand often takes many months, from strategy and naming checks through design to rollout across every touchpoint. Rollout is usually the slowest and most underestimated stage.

Why do customers hate rebrands?
Customers use logos, colours and packaging as shortcuts to find what they trust. When those cues disappear without a visible improvement in the product or service, people feel the brand has changed for its own sake.

Before you change clothes in public, make sure there is a reason worth showing: talk to us about rebranding.